Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus that prints a job including a plurality of documents, a control method thereof, and a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium.
Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, there exists a technique of designating a print range and printing a plurality of documents (for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2008-210401). In this technique, the information of a page range to be printed in each document is added to the setting information of the document, thereby printing an arbitrary page of each document.
On the other hand, documents handled by a user have many formats such as PDF (Portable Document Format) and PS (PostScript). To allow the user to handle a document without being aware of its format in a print workflow, formats such as JDF (Job Definition Format) capable of managing the pages of a plurality of documents as one job have been proposed.
When using a format capable of managing the pages of a plurality of documents as one job, for example, a job as shown in FIG. 8 is generated by an application. A job 801 includes documents 802a, 802b, and 802c in this order whose total numbers of pages are 2, 3, and 2, respectively. The documents can have different formats. A print range designation 803 is added to the job 801 as the information of a page range to be printed. The print range designation 803 is defined not by the page numbers of the documents but by serial page numbers in the entire job. Since pages 4 to 6 are designated as the print range in the job 801 having seven pages in total, the second and third pages of the document 802b and the first page of the document 802c are printed. At this time, the print range designation is not added to each of the documents 802a to 802c included in the job 801.
When a printing apparatus receives such a job, the number of pages of each document included in the job is unknown. It is therefore impossible to grasp which page of which document corresponds to, for example, the fourth page of the job 801.
Hence, the printing apparatus is required to be able to print even a job including a plurality of documents in different formats and having a print range designation defined by serial page numbers in the entire job.